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We speak with Mother Jones voting rights correspondent Ari Berman about the shocking FBI raid on an elections hub in Fulton County, Georgia. Federal agents were seeking records related to the 2020 presidential election, which President Donald Trump continues to falsely claim he won despite his loss to Joe Biden that year. During his efforts to overturn the election results, Trump pressured local officials to "find" him an additional 11,780 votes. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was on the scene Friday despite having no domestic law enforcement authority. The raid comes amid an ongoing federal probe into the 2020 election.
"The fact that they seized 700 boxes of ballots was incredibly disturbing and sets a chilling precedent for how Trump might try to interfere in the 2026 election," says Berman, who ties the raid in Georgia to the administration's pressure on Minnesota to hand over voter rolls. "This is now a multifront, concerted effort to try to interfere in the midterm elections."
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The Justice Department on Friday released an additional 3 million pages of documents related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Trump administration says it was the final release of Epstein files, even though some 2 million more documents remain unreleased. The latest batch reveals new details about Epstein's connections to the rich and powerful, including Hollywood figures, tech billionaires, public officials and more. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said it is unlikely anyone else would be prosecuted.
Attorney Arick Fudali, who represents 11 Epstein survivors, says the release of the files has been a "perfect storm" of "incompetency and an active cover-up" by the Trump administration. "It's so mind-boggling, because they're withholding documents that they shouldn't be withholding … but, on the other hand, they're showing documents that they shouldn't be showing because they contain unredacted names of survivors," says Fudali.
Investigative journalist Vicky Ward, who has covered the Epstein case for many years, says despite the flawed release of the files, they continue to shine light on a world of elite impunity and excess. "We just see over and over again in these documents, there's just one big billionaires boys club that treated women like objects," says Ward.
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He was chastised for remarks ridiculing the pardons of two congressional campaign aides who had been convicted in a bribery plot.
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